NVIDIA has produced a new video for Cryostasis, the PhysX accelerated shooter from 1C. Wondering how the game compares visually with PhysX on versus off? Wonder no more:
As you can see in the side-by-side video, the game looks significantly better with PhysX effects enabled. You can literally see individual water droplets. The particle effects look better too. On the other hand, the water effects in the non-PhysX version look significantly worse than any recent game I've seen. Surely they could've done a better job than that?
I'm not sure it's really fair describe the Glide API as a 'miserable failure' - afterall, it was arguably a large part of what made 3dfx so big in the first place. Don't forget that 3dfx didn't even have a full opengl ICD until the release of Quake3 (instead parsing GL calls to Glide via a minigl driver), and one could almost suggest that this was their most successful period. When 3d acceleration was in it's infancy and hardware power was limited, the speed of Glide made it very attractive.
At the end of the day, the decline of 3dfx was largely down to more basic factors such as the lack of performance relative to e.g. the Geforce DDR, R&D delays, STB merger (lack of adequate/diverse distribution channels) etc.
» Its all too funny and ironic... ~10 years ago (woah, time flies), there was an explosion of new games of all sorts. Dozens of developers licensed Unreal or Quake engine. But more importantly, after struggling for years to catch on, DX7/DX8 got it right.
Anybody and everybody supported it. And there weren't constant DX runtime updates or kooky physics API add ons. DX was assumed to be a self contained unit for everything. No shaders back then, just normal maps and shadow maps... but games didnt look bad - graphics were sufficient, and gameplay features were the focus. Examples: Civilizations III and Black & White and Diablo II (all 2001).
Game company need to take their time, and plan out cool story and great game mechanics, and focus less on having up to date special effects (Duke Nukem Forever?)
Ideally it should be less about eye candy and more about efficient use of time. If you have a really good physics engine in place, which PhysX and Havok are, then a lot of the time spent doing physics effects should be freed up for other resources. Right now the big problem is you still have to program for non-accelerated setups. Similar to the way it was when Q2 came out. They still had software rendering, which took a good bit of development resources, despite the fact that it was MUCH easier to let the hardware APIs do the real work. Physics will eventually be the same. Right now we're at the tipping point between software and hardware based physics. Early adopters will have more work but it will help push it into the mainstream.
Yoshi (2319) May 09, 2009 - 08:18 pm | Edited on May 09, 2009 - 08:27 pm
So without a PhysX card they want us to think we get effects worse than Half Life 2 which has been out for like 5 years? Really the PhysX looks good but come on even Half Life 2 had better physics of items moving around than the non PhysX video.
Based on this video I bet the next thing we start seeing is NVIDIA cards running PhysX next to Wii based versions of the games showing NVIDIA's top of the line cards up against the best selling graphics chips of ATI... Really I shouldn't give them ideas.
» The hatred I see is amazing I'm really amazed by all the whining and hatred. I guess the zombies have been trained to be smart and cool, and that means bashing the big boy...
I was at AT, and I saw that nvidia had created a new technology in their driver, ambient occlusion, and it produced shadows, in fact in that two year old game, HL2, that never were there before and no game code developement was needed to see - and gigantic crew of raging red rooster rooters typed things like: " Shadows suck, who needs em"
" I turn shadows off so I can see "
"another gimmick that can't make any game better"
" If I want shadows I'll turn down brightness "
"games are too dark already screw shadows they suxxorsss!!!! "
It was really amazing, since the same crew immediately afterwards started braying about Havok, dissing PhysX, bawling about tesselation and claiming nvidia blocked it's implementation on ati hardware, and on and on and on !
I've never seen a bigger crowd of ragging women in my entire life.
I see the same thing all over the place, raging red roosters, ragging like sourpussed nags, old crinkly witchy nags you might kill instantly when encountered in a game.
It's just amazing to me.
Meanwhile ATI loses billions a year on just billions a year in sales, Nvidia makes a profit, and gains 6% desktop market share...
I guess it takes a cranky old witch to understand all the problems with the most popular and full featured and multi-use desktop videocard.
Cuda
PhysX
Modded and default game profiles in driver
Forced sli in default driver
Secondary card RE-use for PhysX
Ambient Occlusion shading and shadows free
TWIMTBP game support
Ntune OC ! for boards, cpus ram and the NVcards
Shall I go on ?
Ati has NONE of those above.
Cuda - DX11 contains GPGPU functionality
PhysX - Havok
Modded and default game profiles in driver - Yes, they do
Forced sli in default driver - What?
Secondary card RE-use for PhysX - With W7, you can do that with an ATI as your primary card and an nvidia as secondary.
Ambient Occlusion shading and shadows free - part of dx10
TWIMTBP game support - wtf is that?
Ntune OC ! for boards, cpus ram and the NVcards - Catalyst has the same feature. AMD Overdrive or something like that.
So... your point was again? Additionally, the graphics division of AMD is profitable except for some of the remaining write downs from the ATI acquisition. AMD's cpu division is where the real hurt is right now. And their logo is green.
So you are saying that Havok which is pretty much going to be the future since it has support from ATI, Microsoft and Intel is going to lose to NVIDIA? Really I know highschool kids would love to get their hands on what you are smoking.
Bottom line NVIDIA has games like this to show off PhysX while Havok gets games like Diablo 3 and Starcraft II.
Lidale (311) May 08, 2009 - 01:50 pm | Edited on May 08, 2009 - 01:52 pm
wow they dumbed down the non-physx version by ALOT. Alot of those effects could of easily had been handled in the non-physx version.
There are some things there that are indeed more advanced but much of the basic stuff like squirting realistic looking water at the very least could of been done much better
Labotomizer (1077) May 09, 2009 - 11:21 am | Edited on May 09, 2009 - 11:24 am
I do, currently, have an nVidia DX10 card. Finally got my 8800GTS 640 back from EVGA RMA. I didn't really elaborate on my point either I suppose. I don't care that they invested money into the game. At all. In fact, I think the subsidising of game development by hardware manufacturers is, overall, good for all gamers in general. Would I like to see PhysX opened up to run on any GPGPU capable device? Of course I would. I also understand that it's unlikely.
The developers also probably didn't go out of their way to "dumb the game down". I'd imagine that the graphic effects that use PhysX are MUCH easier to do than the old manual, software driven way. So I can see why they wouldn't have invested a huge amount of resources into developing it for cards without PhysX. It was mostly just a flippant comment I thought some might find amusing is all.
edit - Additionally it does somewhat bother me that a company that built itself on open-APIs (OpenGL and DirectX) would start heading down the patch of 3Dfx with it's closed physics API. It failed miserably for Glide, and it will probably, in the long run, waste money for nVidia. As soon as DX has built-in physics accerlation it will all have been a wasted effort anyway.
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